Q from Olivier - Are the data nodes MySQL servers too ?
No, the data node is handled by a separate process, ndbd, that only manages data.

Q from Olivier: So, what is MySQL Cluster? A MySQL AB product ?
Technically speaking, MySQL Cluster is a storage engine, based on a network distributed database. From a commercial point of view, we refer at MySQL Cluster as a product. We also provide APIs to access to the Cluster database directly, bypassing the MySQL Server and the storage engine architecture.

Q from Ludovico: Are there load balancing mechanisms to balance sql requests between active sql server nodes?
Yes, absolutely. The SQL nodes all see the same data, and load may well be balanced between them, if necessary.
The only caveat is that transactions must be locked into the same SQL server for the duration of the transaction.
In real …

Putting aside the infrastructure that Amazon has put into place for
S3 Service, think about the S3 from an API standpoint vs Webdav.

Webdav is an HTTP protocol for sharing files. It makes an http server
appear as though it is a local filesystem. For webdav the HTTP
protocol was extended for PROPFIND, PROPPATCH, MKCOL, COPY, MOVE,
LOCK and UNLOCK. It also makes use of the DELETE and PUT keywords. S3
is a bit different, it takes a REST approach and uses just GET, PUT,
and DELETE.

Its simple, straight forward, and very easy to code too.

S3 though is not a protocol, it is a service.

S3 as a popular service creates a de-facto API.

Now does S3 do everything that webdav provides? No, but it does the …

OSBC last week provided an opportunity for three open source funding announcements (MuleSource, Zmanda, and SnapLogic), and real-time Linux vendor Concurrent announced a sale of common stock the week before. Here are the details…

MuleSource: May 22nd funding announcement (press release) of $12.5m in Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company raised its initial $4m Series A last year from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Morgenthaler Ventures. MuleSource maintains the popular open source ESB, Mule, and is focused on open source options for integration and SOA.

Concurrent: May 16th funding announcement (press release) of …

You would think I’d get very use to seeing the power of the Web and open source in action working at MySQL. However, recently I got another dose of “wow” on the power and speed of both.

As a project for a Master’s program I’m in, I created a new web site and organization. I was amazed at how quickly I got everything out on the Web. I’m not a “host it yourself” kind of guy, so I picked a highly rated web hosting outfit and after filling out a single form and giving them an obscenely small amount of money, my domain was registered and I upload my entire site in under 10 minutes.

As part of this same project, I needed to create Podcasts, so I downloaded Audacity, which is a FOSS audio mixing product. Before long, I had professionally sounding Podcasts which surprised even my friends in terms of how good they sound (all I used was Audacity and a $40 mic headset). One friend commented that a family member had recently …

In this version we updated both PHP versions (to 4.4.7 and 5.2.2), MySQL (5.0.41) and phpMyAdmin (to 2.10.1). In the Windows beta we also fixed the security vulnerability published April 28th.

Get the downloads and more details on the specific XAMPP project page.

Hi,

Been a long time since last I posted.

I just got back from the Cluster Summit in Stockholm.

During this meeting we covered topics such as Design and Internals of MySQL Cluster, Dolphin Express for MySQL Cluster, Road Map discussion, Cluster & Replication Troubleshooting, Benchmarks with new performance patches and of course QA.

Items brought up during the QA Discussion included:

* HA Testing (High Availability)
* Log Events Testing
* Large Data sets
* Backup/Restore
* Configuration Testing
* Functional testing (Regression testing of Standard Functionality)
* Profiling
* Performance

So as you can see from above, I will be busy for some time to come :-)

Many of the above are being done now. We discussed how to take them to the next level.

During this meeting I was asked to take …

If you haven't seen my previous post on the MySQL User Defined Function Repository, take a minute to check it out!!

Today, I did a major structural overhaul of the site, and filled up the roadmap. I have also just added a new library to the project. This library lib_mysqludf_sys contains a number of functions that allows one to interact with the operating system.

• 
  
• sys_exec - executes an arbitrary command, and can thus be used to launch an external …

In this version we updated both PHP versions (to 4.4.7 and 5.2.2), MySQL (5.0.41) and phpMyAdmin (to 2.10.1). In the Windows beta we also fixed the security vulnerability published April 28th.

Get the downloads and more details on the specific XAMPP project page.

I wrote a custom imageless CAPTCHA for my blog a while ago. I didn't write it as a plugin, so I lost it when I upgraded Wordpress a couple weeks ago. Not having this in place to help eliminate comment spam was an eye-opening experience, and vindicated much of what I asserted in my original posts: a naive question-and-answer system is highly effective at stopping spammers, probably as effective as scrambled images. Read on for the details.

My buddy David Pollak, host of a local geekbeer social event, thinks Scala is the next big thing in web programming.  Scala is an object-oriented / functional programming language that compiles down to Java byte code.  It's statically typed but fully supports generics and polymorphism.  And it's published under an open source BSD-like license. 

David's got pretty good street cred; he's built large scale applications in everything from C++, C#, Ruby and pretty much everything else in between.  Over lunch recently he told me in a rather offhand fashion that he used Scala and the related lift framework to write a Twitter clone (called Skittr) in 800 lines that scales to 1 …